The complaints from Mexicans just keep on coming about Ken Burns’ PBS World War Two documentary because the original did not pay unique attention to hispanic veterans. As usual, the self-appointed representatives of their vets do not consider them to be American soldiers first, but a group apart who need to be glorified in a special way.

(The cartoon shown is from the pro-Mex comic strip website, Baldo, which has been flacking the issue.)

Listen to the NPR interview linked below to hear Angelo Falcon express a political motive for his campaign against Burns’ artistic freedom. He asserts that hispanics need to be seen “in a positive light… at a time when latinos are being attacked because of this horrible immigration debate.” Honoring veterans is not his agenda.

Ken Burns acceded to the demands, but the protests have not stopped. Angelo Falcon found the added hispanic segment shown thus far to be “excellent” but complained bitterly that the piece appeared tacked on. The film, which was six years in production, had been completed when the hispanics demanded changes, but Falcon wanted perfect seamlessness along with the additional material. There is simply no satisfying these reconquista activists.

The larger goal is to rewrite history to exaggerate hispanics’ contributions to the history of America. Mexicans want us to forget that their invasion has been recent and rapid: Ken Burns observed that the hispanic population during WWII was only 1.4 percent.

Filmmaker Ken Burns’ new documentary The War recently debuted its first episode on PBS. Before its release, Burns was criticized by Latinos who said the film failed to acknowledge Latino contributions to the war. In response, Burns agreed to add new material. Still, some Latinos remain unimpressed. Angelo Falcon, of the National Institute for Latino Policy, and Lionel Sosa, a PBS board member, explain the lingering discontent.
[Latino Group Holds Applause for 'The War' NPR 9/24/07]

In Harlingen Texas, a group demonstrated against the film on Friday.

“They left us out,” veteran Maximo Belmarez said. “Mexicans played a big part of the war. It was not puros gueritos fighting.”
[Protesting 'The War', Brownsville Herald 9/21/07]

As I mentioned in Hispanic Historic Revision: WWII, all patriotic Americans honor those who served in the military during war. But this continuing controversy detracts from what should be an untroubled homage to aging veterans for the most unworthy of political aims, that of destroying America.

Candidate John Edwards has given his big education speech, in which he says in effect that the President’s job, Constitution be damned, is to run every public school in the country. (Just you wait, private schools and foreign countries, just you wait…) And that’s not all! He’s also going to send everybody to college.

In general, America’s education policy makers, like school board members, state legislators, Senator Kennedy, President Bush, and Candidate Edwards give the strong impression that they are unable to understand simple cause and effect reasoning about issues of selection in education, and instead rely upon wishful thinking and sentimentalism to make up laws and regulations off the top of their heads.

Consider, for example, the dropout problem in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second largest.

In LA public high schools, 9th grade classes are typically twice the size of 12th grade classes because half the students drop out.

Bizarrely, the LA school board has decided to attempt to raise the graduation rate by making it harder to graduate. This year’s 9th grade class will be the first to be required to pass not just Algebra I and Geometry to graduate, but now they also must pass Algebra II. At at least one high school, I am told, the entering 9th graders weren’t informed about this new requirement, on the grounds that once they hear about it, many would likely give up and dropout right away.

In the LA school district, only 7-8% of 9th graders get 1000 or higher on the SAT (Math plus Verbal, not Writing). That would be an 890 under the pre-1995 SAT scoring system.

The school board is also going to require an extra year of foreign language to graduate. This won’t bother the Latinos all that much since Spanish is just about all they teach in LA anymore (there are only two German teachers left in the 700,000 student district), but will just hammer the graduation chances of African-Americans, who really dislike learning Spanish. For example, a lawyer who had been a protege of Johnnie Cochran told me in 2001 that only four out the 900 black LAPD officers speak Spanish.

The idea behind these changes is to make sure that LAUSD graduates are qualified to attend the elite University of California system, by requiring more of what UC calls A-G courses. Yet, by law, the UC system is reserved for the top 1/8th of California high school students. (The California State University system is aimed at the top 1/3rd, and the Community College system is open to everybody else.)

But, then, who cares about the other 7/8ths? I mean, why does anybody have to be in the lower 7/8ths? If we just stopped succumbing to the soft bigotry of low expectations, everybody could be part of the top 1/8th!

In reality, what we need are high school diplomas that are like the Oxford/Cambridge diplomas, where you take a big test at the end and are awards a First, Second, Third, or Pass degree. We have a lot of students for whom getting a Third in high school would be a major accomplishment, a goal for which they could strive, and just getting a Pass degree would at least represent to potential employers that they are reasonably tractable.

This is satire.

This one’s real. So’s this.

Jay Root of McClatchy Newspapers reports on the latest doings in Mexico. As a reader points out, perhaps one reason American newspapers don’t cover Mexico much is because it was the second most dangerous country in the world for journalists in 2006, following only Iraq.

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.. gangland-style executions have surged, with the report counting 1,588 in the first half of 2007. For the full year of 2001, there were 1,080 such crimes, the report said.

Mexico’s violence is often spectacular and lurid, with tales of street shootouts, decapitations and bomb blasts filling Mexico’s news pages and airwaves. No place is immune, including the buildings of the country’s news outlets.

In May a severed head wrapped in newspaper was left in a cooler outside the office of Tabasco Hoy in Villahermosa, where drug violence is on the rise. Grenades have been tossed into newsrooms from Cancun to Nuevo Laredo in the past 18 months. The Paris-based organization Reporters Without Borders reported that Mexico was the most dangerous country for journalists in 2006, after Iraq.

On May 14, suspected drug traffickers on motorcycles gunned down Jose Nemesio Lugo, a senior federal investigator in charge of gathering intelligence on drug traffickers, in Mexico City’s upscale Coyoacan neighborhood. Two days later in Sonora state, about 20 miles south of Arizona, a five-hour shootout between heavily armed commandos and police left 20 people dead.

The bloodbath continued unabated this month, with the assassinations of two state police chiefs. The first was Jaime Flores of San Luis Potosi state, shot in the head multiple times in front of his wife on Sept. 13. Then on Wednesday came news that Marcos Manuel Souberville, the state police chief in Hidalgo, had fallen in a hail of bullets during an afternoon drive-by shooting.

Many prominent Mexicans have sought refuge in the United States, but that is no guarantee of safety. Mario Espinoza Lobato, a businessman and city councilman from Ciudad Acuna, was gunned down Wednesday at his home in neighboring Del Rio, Texas, authorities said. He was an outspoken critic of the criminal gangs that he said had tried to kidnap him.

Kidnapping is a multi-million dollar industry in Mexico. The report from Congress indicates there are about 4,500 kidnappings a year, about a third of which are reported. Greg Bangs, head of the kidnapping and ransom unit at the Chubb Group of Insurance Companies, said Mexico has rocketed past Colombia to become the world’s ransom capital.

“Mexico is now very definitely No. 1 in the world in terms of the numbers of kidnappings,” Bangs said. “Kidnappers are indicating how serous they are by sending parts of ears and noses and fingers and various bodily parts … they didn’t used to do that so much, but that seems to be more prevalent.”

Top officials here continue to insist their efforts are paying off even if the numbers don’t show it. At a news conference last week, Medina, the attorney general, told reporters “there is a decrease” in organized crime murders.

But then Medina provided figures for “violent executions” in January and February — 175 and 208, respectively.

“They’re going down?” one reporter asked.

“I wish they were lower than last year,” Medina responded. “But in the first months of this year there were more than in the same period last year.”

Congressman Juan Francisco Rivera, chairman of the Chamber of Deputies Committee on Security, expressed confidence in the government’s crime-fighting campaign. He said pointedly that Americans should not be so quick to judge Mexico.

He described the country’s violent crime wave as temporary, while in “cities like Detroit, Houston or Dallas, it has become a permanent thing.” Rivera also called on U.S. authorities to do more to stop illicit firearms exports.
“That’s what is killing us,” Rivera said. “I think if look at the number of arrests, the number of drug seizures, the number of policemen who have risked their lives and who have been killed, I think it shows that our Army and local police forces are engaged in a frontal battle.’[McClatchy Washington Bureau | 09/22/2007 | Mexico crime continues to surge]

My fellow Americans: One way you can help the good people of Mexico out is by not buying drugs. (It will also help the good people of American out, and yourself as well.)

By the way, Mexico also is being plagued by a Marxist terrorist-revolutionary group that has been blowing up petrochemical pipelines.